Hey, Friends! Welcome to Dove's Letters Delivered!
I’m thrilled to have you here!
This space is dedicated to spotlighting the long-form blogs I share on my main blog, @justlifewelle. Over there, you’ll find a lively mix of short-form bursts of creativity alongside those in-depth pieces I love to write.
But let’s be honest—long-form blogs can sometimes get lost in the hustle and bustle of shorter posts. That’s where Dove's Letters Delivered comes in! This blog is here to give those longer reads a space to truly shine, free from the shuffle.
Every long-form post I create will still be published on Briechyne, but I’ll also share it here so it’s easier for you to find, revisit, and enjoy at your own pace.
Thank you for stopping by! Feel free to explore, share your thoughts, and immerse yourself in these deeper dives.
Happy reading,
Eleanor Dove
Blog List:
December 2024
What I've Been Reading So Far
It Was Just Christmas A Few Days Ago
Quick Difference Between Narnia and Middle Earth
Tea or Coffee? Matcha.
Die With A Passion
January 2025
Intelligence is Determination
The Lord of the Memes
Music and Narnia and Middle Earth
Rich Without Luxury
My Thoughts On Moving Out
2 Weeks in Tumblr
Why The Ride of the Rohirrim Makes You Cry
What is "Luxury" To You?
A Quick Chat From My Desk
Are Teacher Supposed to Teach?
You've Got Nothing To Lose
Huan Must've Been Grigio...Maybe?
February 2025
The Farce of Minor Subjects: An Academic Rant NO ONE ASKED For
A Quick Chat From My Desk: Part Two
The Funny Thing About Missing Out
Just the Konbini Things
March 2025
It's the Things at Home
I Did Nothing All Day
Yes, I Bought a New Keyboard
Weirdly Motivated to Write
What's so special about the rain?
August 2025
Here’s to the first week in college
October 2025
Where did my Villain Plot started? Uh, Uni.
November 2025
Understand, Life Can Be...
December 2025
The Quiet Rebellion of Living What You Love
It's a Domino Effect
Elle, What Is This New Hobby About?
March 2026
Am I The Only One Who Gets Overwhelmed?
April 2026
What No One Tells You About A Burning Star
It’s Been a Year…here’s an update
(Blogs highlighted in bold orange are exclusive Patreon content. While you can preview them, the full blogs are available to Patreon members. Join my Patreon to unlock access and dive into the complete posts!)
UPDATE: Hello, my friends! My bold orange Patreon Exclusive links might be broken from the username change, here's my Patreon link to read all of my member exclusive blogs -> patreon.com/justlifewelle
Before you buy the domain and yes, you will buy the domain before you are ready, because that is the kind of decision that feels both impulsive and inevitable someone should sit you down and ask you one question: what are you actually trying to build?
Not what do you want to post. Not what do you want to sell. What are you building? Because a website is not a post. It is not a blog. It is not a shop or a gallery or a newsletter landing page, though it can be all of those things at once. A website is an architecture. It is the decision, made deliberately and out loud, to exist on the internet on your own terms with your own rules, your own layout, your own relationship with the people who find you.
That distinction matters more than most people realize when they are standing at the beginning of it, excited and a little overwhelmed and already Googling domain registrars. Because the question of what you are building determines every single decision that follows. It determines the platform you choose, the pages you create, the tone you write in, the things you charge for and the things you give away. It determines whether your website becomes something people return to, or something that quietly sits there looking pretty while collecting digital dust.
"A platform gives you an audience and a lease agreement. Most of us sign without reading the second part."
I have been on Tumblr for long enough to understand what a platform gives you and what it quietly takes. It gives you reach, the beautiful, almost accidental kind, where someone finds your post through a reblog chain and decides to stay. It gives you proximity to other people building similar things. It gives you infrastructure you did not have to design yourself. And in exchange, it asks you to exist within its rules, its algorithm, its flagging system, its decisions about what does and does not belong here. Most of the time that trade is fine. Sometimes it is not. And eventually if you are building something real, something that has a shape and a direction and a growing audience you start to feel the edges of the container you are living in.
That is not a reason to leave. It is, however, a very good reason to expand.
ɪɪ. ᴡʜᴀᴛ ᴀ ᴡᴇʙꜱɪᴛᴇ ᴀᴄᴛᴜᴀʟʟʏ ɪꜱ
Let us be precise about this, because precision helps. A website is, at its most fundamental, a set of files that live on a server and can be accessed through a browser. A domain is the address you purchase to make that server findable the difference between a house and a house with a street address. Hosting is the land the house sits on. These are not metaphors. They are the literal infrastructure of having a presence online that belongs to you.
But a website is also something more than its infrastructure. It is the answer to the question: what do I want someone to experience when they come here? That experiential design what you put on the page, how you organize it, what you invite people to do is the part that takes not hours but months, sometimes years, to get right. And getting it right is not a one-time event. It is an ongoing process of paying attention to what is working, what is not, and who is showing up.
A website has pages. A home page, which functions like a first impression, the thing someone sees in the first three seconds that determines whether they stay or go. An about page, which is quietly the most important page on any personal or creative website because people need to know who they are dealing with before they trust you with their time or their money. A blog or writing archive, if you are a writer. A shop, if you are selling something. A portfolio, if you are showing work. Every page has a purpose, and the navigation between them should feel intuitive, like moving through a space that was designed with the visitor in mind.
"Your website is the only place on the internet where you write all the rules. That is terrifying. It is also exactly the point."
Maintaining a website is a different kind of work than building one. Building is a sprint: intense, creative, full of decisions. Maintaining is a marathon. It is writing regularly enough that people have a reason to return. It is updating your shop inventory so it reflects what you actually have. It is checking that your links still work, that your pages still load quickly, that the thing someone loved six months ago is still there and still good. Maintenance is the part of website ownership that nobody romanticizes and everybody underestimates.
ɪɪɪ. ᴛʜᴇ ʀᴇᴀʟ ᴇᴄᴏɴᴏᴍɪᴄꜱ ᴏꜰ ɪᴛ
Here is what it costs, honestly. A domain name runs somewhere between the price of a coffee and the price of a nice lunch, per year, depending on the extension and the registrar. Hosting, the server space where your files actually live, varies enormously. Shared hosting is cheap and fine when you are starting out. As you grow, you may want something faster, something that can handle more traffic without slowing down. That costs more.
Then there is the design. If you are using a website builder: Squarespace, Wix, Showit, WordPress with a theme, you are paying for convenience, which is a legitimate and reasonable thing to pay for. If you want something more custom, you are either learning to build it yourself, which has a time cost, or hiring someone to help, which has a money cost. Neither option is wrong. They are just different bets about where your resources are.
But the real economics of a website are not about the domain or the hosting or even the design. They are about the attention economy the invisible ledger of time and trust that determines whether the people who find you keep showing up. And that ledger is built slowly, through consistency, through giving people something they actually want, through being the kind of presence online that makes someone think: yes, I want more of this.
That is not free. It costs you time. It costs you the discipline to write when you do not feel like it and to post when the timing is inconvenient and to keep going when the numbers feel too small to justify the effort. The financial investment in a website is the easy part. The investment of sustained creative attention over months and years, that is the real price of building something that lasts.
ɪᴠ. ᴀᴜᴅɪᴇɴᴄᴇ, ʟᴏʏᴀʟᴛʏ, ᴛʀᴜꜱᴛ
There is a version of this essay where I tell you that if you build it, they will come. I am not going to tell you that, because it is not true, and you deserve better than comforting fiction.
Audience does not migrate automatically. When you build a website and announce it on a platform, some percentage of your existing audience will follow. Some will not, not because they do not like you, but because the friction of going somewhere new is real, and people are busy, and habits are sticky. The ones who follow you are the beginning of something important: they are demonstrating loyalty. They are saying, with their click, that you matter enough to seek out.
Loyalty, in the context of a website and a creative brand, is built through three things: consistency, which means showing up regularly enough that people can count on you; quality, which means giving people something genuinely worth their time when you do show up; and trust, which is the accumulation of both of those things over long enough that someone stops questioning whether you will deliver and simply expects that you will.
"Brand loyalty sounds like a marketing term. It is actually just a relationship built the same way all relationships are built, through showing up."
Brand loyalty is a term that gets used a lot in marketing and means something slightly different in every context. For a small creative website, it means this: the reader who has your tab bookmarked. The customer who checks your shop every time you announce new stock. The subscriber who reads every post not because the algorithm pushed it to them but because they have decided, consciously, that your voice is one they want in their life. That kind of loyalty is slow to earn and hard to lose once you have it. It is also the only kind worth building toward.
A young brand, which is what this is, honestly, should not rush that process. The goal right now is not to have a thousand loyal readers. It is to write well enough and consistently enough that the readers who do find you have a reason to stay. The scale takes care of itself, eventually, if the foundation is solid.
ᴠ. ᴡʜᴀᴛ @ᴊᴜꜱᴛʟɪꜰᴇᴡᴇʟʟᴇ ɪꜱ ʙᴇᴄᴏᴍɪɴɢ
@justlifewelle is getting a real home.
I am building a dedicated website for Eleanor Dove a proper space for everything that lives here: the blog, the moodboards, the shop, the wallpapers. All of it, together, in a place that I actually control.
For readers who want to go deeper, there will be a paid subscription tier: blog drafts, the behind-the-scenes of how posts come together, and hand-drawn wallpapers that will not be available anywhere else. If you run a small business, there will be an affiliate marketing option too.
The spam flagging on this platform has been a headache lately, and honestly, it accelerated this plan. I want a space I can count on and I want you to have a better experience reading here. That is the goal. This is not a goodbye. It is an expansion.
This is what I mean when I say a website is an architecture. What I am building is not just a new URL. It is a consolidation a single place where all the different things that live in different corners of this platform can exist together, legibly, in a form that makes sense to someone who is encountering this brand for the first time.
The blog is the heart of it. That has always been true. Writing is the thing I come back to, the thing I do even when I am not sure anyone is reading, the thing that feels most essentially mine. But a website lets the blog sit alongside everything else; the visual work, the shop, the collaborative relationships with small businesses in a way that a Tumblr archive never quite can. It lets the whole picture come into focus.
The paid subscription tier is an interesting thing to think about, because it changes the relationship between writer and reader in a small but significant way. It introduces an exchange that is more explicit than the one that exists when reading is free: I am giving you something specific and valuable, and you are choosing to pay for it because you trust that it is worth your money. That kind of trust is not demanded. It is earned, over time, through all the free work that came before it. The behind-the-scenes content: the drafts, the process, the timeline of how a post comes together. It is an invitation to understand how this works, which is its own kind of intimacy.
ᴠɪ. ᴡʜʏ ᴛʜɪꜱ, ᴡʜʏ ɴᴏᴡ
Someone will ask why now. Why not wait until the audience is bigger, the brand more established, the bank account more comfortable with the investment? It is a fair question and the honest answer is: because waiting for readiness is a form of avoidance dressed up in practical language.
There is never a perfect time to build something. There is only the time when you decide that the thing you are building toward matters enough to start, imperfectly, with what you have. I have seen the neuroscience of vision boards he way that articulating what you want primes your brain to move toward it and I believe in the principle even outside the literal practice of making a board. You write toward what you want. You build toward what you want. You make the decision, publicly and on the record, that this is where you are going, and then you go.
This blog has always been, in some sense, written on dreams. That is not a weakness. It is a strategy. The life I am writing about the, one that is worth sharing, the one that someone else is quietly dreaming about too, is being built in real time, and the writing is both the documentation and the doing. The website is the next chapter of that. It is the decision to stop existing in borrowed space and start building something that is, genuinely and durably, mine.
If you are reading this on Tumblr, thank you. Truly. This platform gave me something real: an audience, a habit, a reason to write consistently and I am not leaving it behind. But I am building something alongside it that is going to be better, more complete, and entirely on my own terms. And I hope you will come with me when it is ready.
A year ago, I opened Tumblr for the first time in December 2025 with no real plan, just moodboards, a lot of feelings, and the quiet hope that maybe someone out there would find something to love in what I was making. I did not expect that within two or three weeks, a thousand of you would show up. And I certainly didn't expect that just over a year later, we'd be climbing toward five thousand.
So before anything else: thank you. Every reblog, every like, every request you've sent in, you've made this feel like a real place, and you've made Darling Miss Elle very, very happy every time she opens her dashboard.
ᴡʜᴇʀᴇ ᴛʜɪꜱ ᴀʟʟ ꜱᴛᴀʀᴛᴇᴅ
Eleanor Dove didn't arrive out of nowhere. To understand her, you'd have to go back to 8th grade. Me, phone in hand, trying to make my study corner look as beautiful as everyone else's on studygram.
I started as a book review blog. Quiet, small, genuinely mine. Then I pivoted to study tips, because I was a straight-A student and I had things to say about it, not curated things, but real ones, the actual habits and methods I lived by. The problem was Instagram. It was a hard place to exist as a student with just a phone, surrounded by accounts that looked effortlessly put-together and beautiful. I was trying to match an aesthetic I couldn't quite reach, and I felt it every time I posted. Eventually it wore me down.
But something good came out of that difficult stretch: I developed a sense of what works and what doesn't. What fits and what's just noise. That instinct is a big part of what Eleanor Dover is built on.
I took about a year away from social media entirely. And when I came back, I knew I wanted something different.
ꜰɪʀꜱᴛ ʏᴇᴀʀ ᴏꜰ ᴄᴏʟʟᴇɢᴇ
Coming into university undid a lot of what I thought I knew about myself. Your first year has a way of doing that. I lost the straight-A identity I'd built so much of myself around, and for a while I wasn't sure what I was creating for, or who I was creating as. I still wanted to make things. I also, honestly, needed to earn a little which is harder than it sounds when most jobs here require a bachelor's degree before they'll even consider you.
So I tried things. Notion templates, digital products, a whole small business experiment that started as StudyJoMarch and eventually became Briechyne Studios, hosted on Squarespace. I was still a teenager, figuring it out in real time. I learned what I could from that era. Then I archived it and stepped back.
Eleanor Dove came after all of that. I think she's better for it.
ᴡʜᴇʀᴇ ɪ'ᴠᴇ ʙᴇᴇɴ
I'll be honest with you, the way I always try to be: this year has been a lot. I'm a nursing student, and the uni-and-home routine has been relentless, summer classes folded in means there's essentially no breathing room before a new school year begins again. The burnout I mentioned in my last blog hasn't fully lifted. Writing ideas have been slower to come, and behind the scenes I've had to wrestle with this blog more than I'd like to admit.
The YouTube channel is another thing I owe you an honest answer on. I do film, little clips of my week, moments I want to keep but finishing the editing is a different story. Part of it is time. Part of it is imposter syndrome, if I'm being fully transparent. I'm working on it. I'm not abandoning it.
ᴡʜᴀᴛ'ꜱ ᴄᴏᴍɪɴɢ
Here's the part I'm genuinely excited about. This blog is growing, and I want to build something that grows with it properly.
I'm planning to launch a dedicated website for Eleanor Dove a real home for everything: the blog, the moodboards, the shop, the wallpapers. If you run a small business, there'll be an affiliate marketing option. And for readers who want to go a little deeper, I'm working on a paid subscription tier that includes blog drafts, the behind-the-scenes timeline of how posts come together, and hand-drawn wallpapers that won't be available anywhere else.
The spam flagging on this site has honestly been a headache lately, and it accelerated this plan. I want a space I can count on and I want you to have a better experience reading here. That's the goal.
In the meantime, you can already find my planners (paid) and wallpapers (free or pay whatever you'd like) over on Gumroad. I'll always have free things here for you. That part isn't changing.
ᴏɴᴇ ᴍᴏʀᴇ ᴛʜɪɴɢ
I started this blog because I needed somewhere to put the thoughts that wouldn't leave me alone. Writing has always been how I make sense of things and the fact that you choose to read along, that you find something in it worth your time, means more than I know how to say in a blog post.
Here's to whatever year two looks like. I think it's going to be something.
There is a kind of tired that does not have a proper name. Not the kind that a full night of sleep addresses, or a long weekend, or a holiday that ends too soon. It lives deeper than that, behind the eyes, behind the chest, somewhere in the part of you that used to care a great deal and is now just very, very quiet.
You know this tired. You might be carrying it right now.
I am writing this because I think someone needs to say it plainly. Not to fix anything. Not to offer you a solution or a scripture or a motivational caption. Just to say: I see it. The way you are still showing up even when showing up is the hardest thing you do all day. The way you smile at people and answer their questions and function, fully, capably function, even when something inside you is running on the very last of itself.
I see it because I am doing it too.
𝔦. 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔥𝔬𝔫𝔢𝔰𝔱 𝔯𝔢𝔞𝔰𝔬𝔫
I did not go into nursing because I had a beautiful story. I want to be honest about that, even though honesty has never been convenient in interviews.
When they ask, and they always ask, I reach for the borrowed one: my aunt was a nurse, she inspired me (and yes, I do have an aunt who is a nurse but she definitely did not inspire me). I have said it so many times the syllables have gone smooth, like a stone worn down by water. It sounds true enough. It has the right shape. But it was never really mine.
The real reason was quieter and stranger and, I think, more interesting: I wanted to understand. Not save...understand. The body and how it breaks. The disease and how it moves. The fact that two people can have the exact same diagnosis and respond to the exact same medication in two completely different ways, and nobody finds that as remarkable as I do. That specificity, that strange, particular humanness of it, was what pulled me in.
It was never about being heroic. It was about being curious in the most reverent sense of the word.
Maybe that is a selfish reason. Maybe selfish reasons are the only honest ones.
I came into nursing school carrying that curiosity like something precious. I did not know yet how quickly an institution can make you put down the things you are carrying, and pick up theirs instead.
𝔦𝔦. 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔱𝔲𝔢𝔰𝔡𝔞𝔶 𝔱𝔥𝔞𝔱 𝔟𝔯𝔬𝔨𝔢 𝔰𝔬𝔪𝔢𝔱𝔥𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔰𝔪𝔞𝔩𝔩
We had a week off. A whole week, which sounds generous until you remember that a week off in nursing school is not really off, it is just the absence of scheduled suffering. There is still the reading, the reviewing, the low cloud of anxiety that follows you into your sleep and sits at the foot of your bed while you rest.
But still. There were mornings where the light came in slow and nothing was demanded of me, and for a few hours I almost remembered what it felt like to exist without urgency. Almost.
Then Tuesday came.
I remember walking toward the simulation lab and feeling something I did not expect: resistance. Not nerves, I know what nerves feel like, the sharp electric kind before a return demo or an exam. This was different. This was heavier. This was my body saying, in the most exhausted way possible, not again.
And yet I walked in. I always walk in. That is the thing about being the kind of person who shows up, you do not stop showing up just because it is costing you. You pay and you pay and you keep paying and you tell yourself it will be worth it, and on the good days you believe that.
On the bad days, you just keep walking.
The week off was not enough. It was never going to be enough. Because what I needed was not rest from nursing school. What I needed was to remember why I walked in the first time — and that is harder to recover than sleep.
Nobody tells you that burnout does not always look like collapse. Sometimes it looks like perfect attendance. Sometimes it looks like you.
𝔦𝔦𝔦. 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔢𝔵𝔞𝔪 𝔶𝔬𝔲 𝔱𝔬𝔭𝔭𝔢𝔡 𝔞𝔫𝔡 𝔣𝔢𝔩𝔱 𝔫𝔬𝔱𝔥𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔞𝔟𝔬𝔲𝔱
I need to talk about the grades. I know people say they do not matter — that your patient will not ask for your GPA, that what counts is competence and compassion and being present. And perhaps in ten years that will feel true.
Right now, the grades are everything. They are the door that opens or stays shut. They are the difference between moving forward and repeating, between momentum and standing still in a hallway that smells like fluorescent light. I know this. My body knows this. It is why I study through the fog and the headaches and the days when my brain genuinely cannot retain one more thing because the alternative is not an option I am willing to look at directly.
So I study. And sometimes it works. And once, it worked so well that I topped the exam.
I came home. I put my bag down. I sat for a moment in the quiet of having done it and felt almost nothing. A flicker of something, brief and thin, like a match struck in a large room. And then it was gone, and what replaced it was not peace or satisfaction or even relief.
It was just the next question: okay, so what now?
This is the part nobody prepares you for. That you can work so hard for something, reach it, hold it in your hands for a moment, and find it lighter than you expected. And then you set it down and start again, not because you love the chase anymore, but because stopping feels more dangerous than continuing.
A star does not burn because it wants to. It burns because that is the only thing keeping it from collapsing inward.
I thought achieving something would feel like arrival. Instead it felt like a door opening into another corridor. And the corridor had another door. And I was already walking toward it before I had even caught my breath.
Winning, I have learned, is not the opposite of losing. Sometimes it is just a different shape of the same ache.
𝔦𝔳. 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔠𝔬𝔪𝔭𝔞𝔯𝔦𝔰𝔬𝔫 𝔱𝔥𝔞𝔱 𝔰𝔱𝔦𝔫𝔤𝔰
Our university has a particular talent for this. For arranging us in invisible rows and reminding us, quietly and constantly, of exactly where we stand in relation to each other. It is not always said outright. It does not need to be. You feel it in the way scores are discussed, in the way certain names come up over and over, in the particular silence that follows when yours does not.
And so the comparison begins. You cannot help it. You try not to, you know it is not useful, you know it changes nothing, you know that someone else's excellence does not diminish yours. You know all of this. And still.
Still, you look. And you measure. And the measuring goes both ways: outward, toward the people ahead of you, and inward, toward the version of yourself you thought you would be by now.
The hardest comparisons are not with the people who are far ahead of you. They are with the people who are just slightly ahead, the ones close enough that you can see exactly what they have that you do not.
Someone more capable. Someone more focused. Someone who does not seem to carry it the way you carry it, visibly, heavily, in the set of their shoulders and the pause before they answer. Someone who appears, from where you are standing, to be simply better at this than you.
And the sting of it is not really about ego, though it would be easier if it were. It is about caring. You care so much, about doing well, about being enough, about proving something to someone, maybe to yourself, and caring that much makes every comparison land harder than it should.
Happy moments blur. The sting of the bad ones stays sharp for days. That is just how it works, how the mind is built, and nobody thinks to warn you about that either.
So you carry both things at once: the high ego that says I should be better than this, and the quiet doubt that whispers what if you are not as good as you think? And you swing between them. And you keep going.
𝔳. 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔰𝔱𝔯𝔞𝔡𝔦𝔳𝔞𝔯𝔦𝔲𝔰
There is something I think about, on the nights when everything feels too loud and too heavy and too uncertain. Not a plan exactly. More like an image. A feeling I am working toward.
A Stradivarius.
If you do not know, and part of me loves that you might not, a Stradivarius is a violin. One of the finest instruments ever made. The kind of thing that takes decades to be recognized for what it is, that carries centuries of craft in its wood and its curve, that produces a sound unlike anything else in the world. It is not loud. It is not showy. It is simply, profoundly itself.
That is what I am working toward. Not fame, not wealth in the way people mean when they say wealth, though stability matters, genuinely matters, and I will not pretend otherwise. What I mean is a life that has been made carefully. A life where the hard years meant something. Where I can look at what I have built: my own home, my own peace, maybe a person I love, maybe children I will not let feel unseen, and know that I made it. That I did not give up on the Tuesday that broke something small, or the exam that felt like nothing, or the comparison that stung for days.
The Stradivarius is not the destination. It is the proof. That all of this: the tired, the fog, the days I functioned on pure stubbornness, t made something. Something worth hearing.
(And you might be thinking...Elle do you know how much a Strad costs?! Yes I do, darling. That's why it's called a dream.)
I hold onto that image on the nights I need it most. Not because it makes the present easier. It does not. But because it reminds me that the present is not the whole story. That burning does not have to mean disappearing. That a star gives light precisely because it is spending itself.
𝔳𝔦. 𝔴𝔥𝔞𝔱 𝔦 𝔴𝔞𝔫𝔱 𝔶𝔬𝔲 𝔱𝔬 𝔨𝔫𝔬𝔴
I do not have a resolution for you. I told you that at the beginning and I meant it. There is no neat ending here, no moment where everything clarifies and the exhaustion lifts and the purpose returns fully formed and luminous.
What I have instead is this:
You are not broken because the joy ran thin. You are not failing because you are hard to find inside yourself right now. You are not weak because you needed the week off to be longer, because Tuesday felt like the worst place in the world, because topping the exam felt like nothing and then you cried a little about that, about the nothing, which somehow hurt more than failing would have.
The fact that you are still here, still walking into the simulation lab, still studying through the fog, still showing up in every sense of that phrase is not ordinary. It looks ordinary. From the outside it looks like just another day. From the inside, you and I both know what it costs.
You are a burning star. You are spending yourself to give light. And no one is telling you that that is both the most beautiful and most exhausting thing a person can be.
I still do not have a perfect answer for why I am here. The honest one does not fit into the shape of an interview. Maybe it never will. Maybe that is okay. Maybe the point was never to have a story that sounds good from the outside.
Maybe the point is just to keep going on the days when going is the hardest thing. And to know — even if only barely, even if it is the smallest and most fragile kind of knowing — that somewhere, someone else is also going.
Short answer? No, I'm definitely not the only one. But when it comes to separating my work life from my personal life, oh, I am so bad at it. Like, embarrassingly bad. I try, I really do, but somehow the lines always end up blurring and I'm left standing in the middle of a mess I didn't ask for.
And I want to make one thing very clear before I go on my little spiral here: I love Nursing. Genuinely, wholeheartedly love it. People walk in on what might be the absolute worst day of their lives, and the fact that you get to be there — that you get to help — that means something. That sets something in you. It's the most selfless thing I think I've ever chosen to do, and I'd choose it again.
What I would not choose again, however, is the additional coursework. You know the kind, the subjects that exist in theory but the instructors barely show up for in practice. No discussions, no guidance, just a pile of assignments dropped on your lap like "figure it out, good luck, bye." And we do figure it out! We always do! But at what cost? I'm sitting here putting real time and real effort into work that we're all secretly aware is going straight in the trash the moment the semester ends. Can we not be doing something more useful with that energy?
And then there are our Clinical Instructors, some of whom are absolute angels, by the way. The ones who actually show up, who make sure you get it, who genuinely care? I appreciate them more than I can say. But even on a bad day, they're still a thousand times better than whatever is happening in our other subjects. It's not even close.
So here's where the overwhelm really kicks in. I have group chats. So many group chats. One for every subject, every project, every random thing that needs coordinating and on top of all that, there's the informal section chat, which is supposed to be the chill one, but somehow that one has the most messages. I open it and there are hundreds of unread texts and I have to scroll up for what feels like forever just to find the one announcement that actually matters.
I am not a "tentative schedule" kind of person. I need "this is happening today, we are doing this today." Firm. Confirmed. No surprises. Is that so much to ask?
Oh, and one more thing about me, I don't really get attached to my classmates. I know. I know. The irony of a Nursing student saying that is not lost on me. But the extra noise that comes with it genuinely wears me out more than it grounds me, and I've made my peace with that.
We don't get to choose whether we take this additional coursework, either. Before anyone types "just switch" — we can't. So. Moving on.
I genuinely believe our brains were not built for this much information. I'm saying this as someone currently living proof of that statement.
Act II. My Digital Boundaries
Okay so in the spirit of trying to keep my sanity intact, I've built myself a little system. It's not perfect, but it's mine.
I have a work phone, an iPhone 7 I literally brought back from the dead, because I refused to let school bleed into my personal phone. We get reshuffled every semester anyway, so it made sense to just keep it separate. It's got the basics: MS Teams, Messenger, Google. Functional. Contained. That's the goal.
My iPad is mostly for entertainment and personal stuff, and sometimes a second screen. I tried the whole handwritten notes on GoodNotes thing and very quickly learned that I am simply not that girl, lecture slides move too fast and my hand cannot keep up. Laptop and Google Docs it is. I use Gemini and NotebookLM for quizzes and review, usually on the iPad, and honestly that setup works really well for me.
My Samsung is my personal phone and it is a sanctuary. Nothing work-related lives there. It's where I doomscroll, decompress, and exist as a normal human being. The problem is that I've set specific hours for checking my work phone, and every time I open it during those hours, I am greeted by a wall of messages in the informal chat, most of which have absolutely nothing to do with anything important. I don't mute it because our Class Head uses it for announcements, but everything that follows those announcements? Chaos. Pure chaos.
I think I need to start doing a proper digital detox on Sundays. My brain needs at least one day where it isn't pinging from notification to notification. I need to think straight. I need to breathe.
Anyway. Wish me luck out there, and have an amazing day, friends. 💙
Okay, deep breath. This is it. The big announcement I've been building up to all week.
My first YouTube vlog goes live TOMORROW—December 31st at 11:00 AM GMT. 🎥✨
I still can't believe I'm typing this. Like, I've been talking about doing this for years, watching other creators, feeling inspired but also terrified, wondering if I'd ever actually press that record button. And now? It's happening. It's real.
My channel is @justlifewelle—same name as here because this community, this space, this little corner of the internet we've built together? It means everything to me. And I wanted to bring that same warmth, that same authenticity, to YouTube.
You've been here for the moodboards, the blogs, the cozy vibes. Now I'm inviting you to see the real behind-the-scenes—the messy study sessions, the 3am coffee runs, the quiet moments of a nursing student just trying to figure it all out. It won't be perfect. It won't be glossy. But it'll be real, and it'll be me.
I'm so grateful for this community. Your support here on Tumblr gave me the courage to finally do this thing I've been scared of for so long. So thank you. Truly.
If you'd like to subscribe and come along for this ride, I'd absolutely love to have you there. No pressure, as always—but knowing you're there would mean the world. 💛
First vlog drops tomorrow. December 31st. 11:00 AM GMT. Let's end 2025 together and start something new.
Also anxious about how this is going to go with my hectic university schedule which is the real definition of "what if we make our students miserable by requiring attendance at every event and then question why this is even relevant to their degree?" Because so far, I have no idea what to expect from the new year, and I'm genuinely scared to start it. Never mind turning 19, that's the least of my problems. My main concern is whether I'll be able to do this consistently, which I really would love to see myself doing, because I've been delaying this small project for way too long.
So here's the reveal: I'm starting a YouTube channel where I film my life as a university student and a person who loves being at home (basically a homebody), trying to keep up with the demands of being a student and a creative.
I haven't done this consistently in the past two years. Maybe I did in 2023, but it got cut short when the new academic year started and all my creation just went down the drain.
This has got me questioning, not whether I should do it, but whether I'm ready to put myself out there. Being in a rather rigid university is quite ridiculous if you think about it, and I laugh about it sometimes because the problem of rigidity and making your students "think for themselves" doesn't really go hand in hand, does it? That's why you need a creative outlet to discover yourself outside of institutions whether that's your workplace or academia.
(By the way, I'll also be posting a blog about education systems and rigidity, so stay tuned. I'd love to hear your thoughts.)
But what can you actually expect when you click that subscribe button?
First off, it won't be perfect. And as the editor and creator, you'd expect it to be polished—but it won't have that glossy, curated aesthetic you see everywhere else.
I'm thinking about narrated vlogs on certain topics—like "when you feel like life betrays you"—so you can hear my voice. Sometimes it'll just be captions and music. Sometimes it'll be rambling thoughts over study footage. It depends on the mood, the moment, the message.
This isn't just another curated feed. This is the behind-the-scenes of the moodboards you love here on Tumblr. This is me, inviting you deeper into my world—the messy, imperfect, beautifully chaotic parts of it.
My first vlog drops December 31st at 11:00 AM GMT.
You can find my channel here: @justlifewelle
Subscribe! I'd love to have you there. 💛
Tomorrow, I'll share the full announcement. For now, I'm just sitting here, equal parts terrified and thrilled.
A domino effect is a chain reaction where one event triggers a sequence of similar, interconnected events, like a line of falling dominoes, leading to a larger outcome. It's a metaphor for cause-and-effect, seen in physics (Rube Goldberg machines), social behavior, business, and finance, where a small initial action can create widespread, significant results, either positive or negative.
I'm joking.
If you search 'Domino Effect' in Google right now, you'll probably see this exact definition. And no, the paragraph above? That's not my voice that's what Google said. The power of Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V, friends. The internet at its finest.
I know, very effective. And speaking of the internet's power, one thing that got me into blogging was the algorithm feeding me cosy aesthetics on Instagram and inspiring writers on YouTube.
So is that a bad thing?
No! Absolutely not! It's actually a beautiful thing, because without it, I wouldn't be here writing this blog, creating aspirational moodboards on Tumblr, and sharing glimpses of my life on Instagram.
I remember wanting to make my life feel like a movie, just like the videos content creators make on YouTube. I've been watching them for years, wondering if I had a camera or a lifestyle like theirs, maybe I could create something just as beautiful. It's inspirational and aspirational, kind of like what our community here on Tumblr looks like, right?
And honestly? That dream kept me away from social media for a long time.
I hated posting. Even when I tried, the posts that got views were so inconsistent I couldn't figure out how to replicate that success. So I just... stopped. For years and years and years.
Eventually, I told myself: "F**k this. I'm going to make this happen or nothing." Because there's absolutely no one stopping me except the voice inside my head saying, "You're not good enough."
And I know we've all been there, especially as university students. That voice doesn't just visit sometimes, it practically moves in. You compare yourself to other people, seeing yourself as not accomplished enough among your peers, never quite measuring up.
Let me tell you a story. If you're a student reading this, you'll probably relate.
This feeling of being small washes over me whenever we have a quiz. My classmates huddle together, reviewing materials and quizzing each other. Meanwhile, I'm outside the lecture room with my earbuds in, scrolling on my phone, because I don't want to hear them whispering about how they "didn't study" and are "just cramming today."
Humour me, it's never quite true when you look into their eyes.
Deep down, I know I studied the material days before the quiz. I engaged with it, understood it, prepared for it. So why do I still feel small compared to them?
That feeling never really goes away. I just have to cling to that well-worn saying: "It's me versus me."
To be honest, it's not much. But it does make me feel a bit better when I frame it that way.
Watching those videos of how "perfect" their lives seem, how curated everything is I used to think that if I just had this equipment or that aesthetic, I could make the perfect YouTube video too.
But reality check: I'm a university student. I have schedules to manage and budgets to stick to. Buying things just so my hobby can "come true" feels unnecessary, it’s more want than need.
Still, the more I watched my favourite creators, the more I wanted to create vlogs like theirs. I wanted to learn, to grow, to try with whatever resources I already have.
They really do inspire me to just grab the camera and start.
And consuming that content, I told myself: I really want to do this. Now.
Because if I keep delaying it? Believe me, it'll never happen.
That's my Domino Effect.
So many creators inspired me to start blogging, build a community, create videos. Without them, I don't think I'd have this hobby at all. And it's safe to say, I genuinely enjoy doing what I love, especially knowing that some of you Travelers actually read my musings. I'm so grateful for that.
Which brings me to the exciting part:
My first vlog is coming out on December 31st at 11:00 AM GMT, the very last, last, day of 2025.
I never thought my Tumblr would get this much traction, and honestly? It gave me the confidence to finally grab the camera and just film. So thank you. Truly.
I really hope you'll like the vlog, and I can't wait to hear what you think when the day comes.
Au revoir! 🌿✨
P.S. What kind of content would you like to see? Study sessions (I’ll try with this because my schedule is expected to be hectic)? Day-in-the-life? Cosy chaos? Let me know in the comments I'm all ears!
If there's something Dead Poets Society taught me, it's the importance of passion, beauty, romance, and love. As a nursing student, I love nursing, I really do. I also love medicine, those things I cannot describe how immensely passionate I am about, literally. If someone asks me, "Why nursing?" or "Why medicine?" or "Why do you want to be a doctor?" I would not know the answer because I'm simply doing the thing that I love the most. And it's more about doing my passion rather than "finding a stable job." That's why it just throws me off when people say that "it's a stable career."
We all equate passion with art or painting or acting. Don't get me wrong, I love movies, I love film, I love filming my day, it's a hobby of mine. But to me, passion is also science and dealing with experiments, or being in something that you can craft with your own hands, perhaps a skin graft or a cannula. Writing is also my favourite hobby and thing to do. I write because talking doesn't really suit me best. I write because I tell myself that every day is another chapter in my life, whether I might have a bad day, a bland day, or a very good day. I'll write my story, and if anyone can't see me, at least I wouldn't be blind to myself.
There's a quiet rebellion in choosing to live this way, in refusing to let the world's machinery grind your spirit into dust. Society whispers its seductions: security, stability, sensibility. It builds boxes labelled "practical" and "impractical," as if the human heart could ever fit so neatly into categories. As if passion were a luxury reserved for the reckless or the privileged, rather than the oxygen that keeps our souls from suffocating.
But here's what they don't tell you: You can do both.
Do what makes you sustain life. Live what makes you cherish it.
These aren't contradictions—they're companions. One hand works, the other writes poetry. One foot walks the practical path, the other dances when no one's watching. You clock in, you show up, you do what must be done to keep the lights on and food on the table. And then—and then—you come alive. You pursue the thing that makes your chest tighten with something that feels like homesickness for a place you've never been.
The world is distorted, yes. Systems creak and groan under the weight of their own contradictions. Society lurches from one dilemma to the next, asking us to be efficient, productive, optimized versions of ourselves. But within that chaos, there's still room—must be room—for the things that make us human. The things that remind us we're more than economic units or cogs in someone else's machine.
When Robert Frost wrote about two roads diverging in a wood, he wasn't advocating for recklessness. He was acknowledging choice. He was saying: I saw both paths, and I chose the one that called to me, even if it was harder, even if it was uncertain. And that choice—that willingness to listen to the whisper beneath the noise—made all the difference.
This isn't about quitting your job in some grand, dramatic gesture. It's not about burning bridges or throwing caution entirely to the wind. It's about refusing to mistake survival for living. It's about understanding that a paycheck can feed your body but cannot, will never, feed your soul.
You can be practical and passionate. You can work the shifts that pay the rent and still carve out hours for the things that make you feel most yourself. You can be a nurse who understands that medicine is both science and art, both protocol and intuition. You can craft a life that honors both necessity and beauty, both duty and desire.
Because here's the truth they don't want you to know: A soulless life is a wasted one, no matter how stable it appears from the outside. You can have the perfect job, the perfect salary, the perfect trajectory—and still feel like you're dying inside, cell by cell, dream by dream. That's not living. That's enduring. And you weren't put on this earth merely to endure.
So yes, find work that sustains you. But for the love of everything sacred, find something—anything—that makes you feel alive. Maybe it's the weight of a scalpel in your hand, the satisfaction of a perfectly placed IV, the wonder of understanding how a body heals itself. Maybe it's the scratch of pen on paper at 2 a.m., writing truths you can't speak aloud. Maybe it's capturing light through a camera lens, freezing moments that would otherwise slip away unnamed and unmourned.
Whatever it is, don't abandon it for the sake of fitting in. Don't let anyone convince you that passion is frivolous or that dreams are for children. The world has enough people going through the motions. It needs more people who are awake—who haven't traded wonder for wages, who still believe that a life worth living is one that makes you feel something.
Write your story. Every bad day, every bland day, every glorious day—write it down. Because even if no one else bears witness, you will know. You will know that you lived deliberately, that you chose not just to exist but to be. That you looked at those two roads and didn't take the easier one out of fear or conformity, but chose the one that resonated with something true inside you.
That's the quiet rebellion: Living what you love while doing what you must. Refusing to let circumstances extinguish the spark. Choosing passion not as an escape from reality, but as the very thing that makes reality worth facing.
In the end, we all write our own stories. The question is: Will yours be one of slow resignation, or will it be a testament to the fact that you lived, truly lived, even in a world that sometimes made it hard to do so?
Seize the day, they say. But I say: Seize the life. All of it. The practical and the poetic, the necessary and the beautiful. Both roads at once, if you must. Just don't forget to live.
There are times when I stay up at night thinking that if I’m not going to have the future I always dreamt of, I’d be such a failure.
Look, it’s not just me. It could be you or the regrets of a retired grandmother who didn’t marry her childhood sweetheart. Either way, that’s the fear most people have, especially when you grew up in conditions that would be deemed unsuitable for a child to survive.
When did having a house become a luxury, when it should be a basic necessity? When did buying vegetables become a luxury, when it should be a basic necessity? When did having a happy family become a luxury, when it should be a basic necessity? When did living a fulfilled life become a luxury, when it should be a basic necessity?
This got me thinking because of our topic in one of our Nursing Theory lectures about retirement. The factors that affect a person’s retirement are: health status, income, family environment, and self-preparation.
And while my instructor was holding her lecture, I paused; stopped listening for a while and started listening to my thoughts. “Ah, basic things,” I thought. Afterwards, I shrugged it off because those are just basic things.
It wasn’t long after I tried not to fall asleep that I remembered: not all people have these basic things we take for granted.
Now, we all have an ideal life to live. That’s why social media exists to look at a wishing well, of sorts, and see ourselves ideally reflected in it. And what’s not to love? You have your job, your dream family, the husband you dreamt of, a big manor with a fountain, the lush garden, the green hills, the life we all want, and maybe, at times, covet.
It’s not a discouraging thought. No, it’s fear. Fear of the inevitable, fear of things beyond our control. And if only we could bargain with a deity, bargain with God, I mean, would He even? One raise of His brow, and it’d all be gone.
Now, I’m not here to discourage anyone.
Moodboards exist because we envision our lives in that sculpted reality. You can build it, in fact, no one’s stopping you. The sky’s the limit. You can push through boundaries, through thoughts, through expectations, through preconceptions.
Hold on.
Push? Are we all not tired?
Tired. Not just from work, or study, or the endless scrolling of a day but from the weight of wanting. From the constant reminder that we should be becoming something, someone better. We run, and we run, and sometimes, we look up and realize we’ve been running toward a horizon that keeps retreating.
There’s a peculiar guilt that comes with fatigue. You sit down for a while; maybe to rest your mind, maybe to breathe, and suddenly, the silence feels heavy, like you’ve committed a crime. You start to wonder if resting means falling behind.
Because we were raised to believe that fatigue is weakness. That being tired is failure. That to dream is to chase without pause that stopping is surrender.
But what they never told us is how human it is to be weary. How even the most beautiful dreams can bruise you if you hold them too tightly.
And maybe that’s the ache of it, the dream is there, you can almost touch it, but your hands tremble. It’s not the distance that hurts, it’s the closeness. So near you can see it glimmering, so far you can’t breathe it in yet.
You start to wonder if you’re allowed to want less. If peace can be enough. If success must always demand exhaustion.
Maybe the real dream isn’t the mansion or the fountain or the green hills. Maybe it’s the morning you wake up without guilt. The night you sleep knowing you’ve done enough, even if you haven’t done it all.
Maybe life isn’t about the reaching, but the quiet moments between. The pauses that don’t need to be filled. The serenity that doesn’t demand an apology.
Understand, life can be gentle and cruel, generous and withholding, distant yet right in your grasp. And sometimes, the most human thing you can do is to stop chasing and simply breathe, even if the world keeps running past you. Your life now is not any less than the one you dream of.
There are days when I seriously ask myself, why do people romanticize university life? Why do they say it’s “the best years of your life”? Because from where I’m standing or, limping, actually it feels more like an endless test of patience, sleep, and sanity.
Everyone keeps saying, “You’ll learn to socialize in college!” Oh, really? Because every time I’m forced to socialize, I feel my social battery implode faster than my GPA during finals week.
University is supposed to be this magical setting where you “build connections,” “make lifelong friends,” and “grow as a person.” But more often than not, it’s just a chaotic simulation of adult life where you’re yelled at by professors, ignored by classmates, and belittled by people your age who somehow think they’re better than you because they finished one group task faster.
And don’t even get me started on group work. Whoever invented the phrase “teamwork makes the dream work” clearly never did a nursing group project at 2 a.m. with people who vanish mid-task. Because teamwork doesn’t make the dream work — it makes you do everyone else’s work and still get scolded like it’s your fault.
🚑 The MCL Incident
Exactly a month ago, as I’m writing this magnificent spiral of thought, my MCL got torn and my university ID got lost. In one single day.
Apparently, someone in my group who may or may not have had unresolved rage toward me “accidentally” hit my knee. And that was that. Boom. Pain. Limping. Crutches. Goodbye, mobility.
And the worst part? Everyone suddenly acted like we were in some medical drama. “Oh my gosh, are you okay?” “That’s so unfortunate!” “We’re praying for your recovery!”
Meanwhile, I was lying through my teeth, smiling and saying,
“It was worth it.”
No. It wasn’t.
It was the worst university experience I’ve ever had. The most useless injury, from the most useless event, wrapped in that classic “It builds character!” justification adults, or rather, Clinical Instructors, love to say whenever something goes wrong.
You know what would really build character?
Letting me rest. Letting me breathe. Letting me learn without all this extra noise.
🎭 The So-Called “Tradition”
And then there’s our Founder’s Week performance: the cursed cherry on top, and no, sorry not sorry for giving it the title it deserves. Our PE instructor had the audacity to call it an “important tradition.”
Sure, I love tradition but not the kind that eats up my schedule, invades my already thin patience, and forces me to dance when I can barely function as a human being.
Why are nursing students expected to perform like theatre majors when we barely have time to memorize anatomy? If you want us to stop being “lazy,” maybe stop dragging us into these “bonding activities” that do nothing but add more stress.
Because, truly, nothing screams academic excellence like a bunch of exhausted nursing students dancing under the sun, pretending to smile while silently calculating how many hours of sleep they’re losing.
And the irony? The same people who yell “You should be grateful for this opportunity!” are the ones who would never survive a day in our shoes. Especially that PE instructor who, let’s be honest, looked like she couldn’t last a full minute in her own class.
💀 The Anxiety Loop
You’d think Founder’s Week or Nurses’ Day would be for us — that we’d get to relax, explore the campus, maybe sit under a tree and contemplate life.
But no. Instead, we get handed a schedule, some vague rubrics, and a “Good luck, do your best!” pep talk that feels more like a curse than encouragement.
So now, my brain is a constant swirl of deadlines, performances, surprise tasks, and that dreaded phrase:
“Okay class, announcement later.”
Every time I hear that, my soul leaves my body.
I’ve reached a point where my anxiety has become so routine that procrastination feels safer than starting early. I wait until the last minute not because I’m lazy, but because my body refuses to enter “study mode” when there’s always something chaotic lurking around the corner.
University was supposed to make me a better communicator, a better leader, a better nurse. But sometimes it just makes me tired. Tired in ways sleep can’t fix.
🩹 What I Really Want
I don’t need “team-building activities” or “character-shaping performances.”
I just want to study. To learn in peace. To become good at what I’m actually here for: getting that damned (or not so damned) nursing degree.
If universities removed all these pointless “minor subjects” and events designed to “foster growth,” nursing could be finished in three years — or four, at most — with every hour spent on what actually matters: the science and art of care.
Instead, we’re juggling unnecessary stress disguised as opportunity, anxiety disguised as excitement, and exhaustion disguised as “the university experience.”
So no, I don’t find joy in every event. No, I don’t get thrilled when they say “it’s mandatory.” And no, I don’t think dancing under fluorescent lights makes me a better nurse.
I think it just makes me human — one who’s trying to survive a system that calls burnout “bonding.”
💬 A Little Note to My Fellow Students
If you’ve ever sat in a hallway with your lunch getting cold because you didn’t have time to eat.
If you’ve ever smiled through a panic attack because someone said “be grateful”.
If you’ve ever wondered why every fun event feels like a punishment disguised as “school spirit”.
Then I really hope that you relate in this rant-ish blog of mine and let's be real, its wouldn't be the last one. Nope, I'm still in my first year and we have THREE MORE YEARS TO GO🔥!
We’re tired, but we’re still showing up. We’re limping, but still laughing about it. We’re anxious, but still doing our best.
University isn’t shaping us into better people. We’re shaping ourselves quietly, stubbornly, in between the chaos.
I haven't been posting a lot because life happens and university is sucking me super dry and honestly I'm still trying to adjust my life in nursing school and, phew, it's been a ride. It really is.
But now...I’ve decided to switch things up a bit! 💫
My blog is now called justlifewelle! Yay 🎉! Because honestly, that’s what I’m here for: sharing pieces of life, my thoughts, my moods, my creative sparks… just life, just me, Elle. 💕
“Briechyne” had a good run from my favourite cheese and the "-chyne" part for more of a French Class. (thank you for being part of that era 🥹), but I wanted something more personal, something that felt like home, something more me and what I do.
And what’s more me than my own name woven into it?
This feels like a fresh start, a little window opening for new ideas, new projects, and more joyful things to come. 🌿 Whether it’s my moodboards, my rambles, or the little snapshots of life, I hope this space keeps bringing light and inspiration to anyone who passes through.
This time of being in Nursing School, in college, I said to myself that I would be in a state where I would not have a friend group. Honestly, I haven’t written in two months now. Like, I came in and lost all time to write and also lost all motivation to write.
This might come off as unstructured, unlike all of my essays, but here we are—back on track with writing. And yes, I really do miss writing. I love the peace of mind it gives me, especially when life bombards me with too much stuff and I barely get any time to do my writing.
Before any of those productivity gurus come at me and say, “You need to time block and manage your schedules,” well, darling, it would be my pleasure to tell you that my uni wants to enforce “community-building” by making us do all these extra performances that God knows what they are about, stay until 10 at night, come home and study, just to go back to school at 7 in the morning the next day.
Thank you for your advice. I’m running on adrenaline, ibuprofen, and the grace of God.
As a student who wants to focus on my academics, having to go through a friendship breakup, reflecting on what I want to do as a leader, and not going to my dream uni even though I was accepted there—but having no choice but to stay here—it really rubs me the wrong way about what to feel as a student. Yes, you’re in the course you’ve chosen. I’m a Nursing Major. But no, you do not want to be here in the first place.
So, I’m currently in this life where I don’t want to do anything but focus on myself: develop my leadership style and have a moment of self-reflection with other people. And focus on my academics: no distractions when it comes to studying, leadership in projects, and making sure everything comes together in one place.
But here’s the problem: I’m the type of person that thrives on listening and solitude.
And I’m with a bunch of noisy and spontaneous extroverts who can’t even make up their minds about the decisions they are going to make. Been with those people—it didn’t work out for me.
Our brains are wired differently. Some want to think in peace before jumping to conclusions. Some thrive on the thrill of making decisions as fast as they can, and both are perfectly all right. It’s the way you think, but the notion of saying that you need “an activity where you get to be in a House of the Literature based on Game of Thrones, to combat with other houses and build community, demerits and merits based if you greet other people on campus as a sign of respect, wearing your complete uniform, and rules outside the campus”—give me a break.
Might I also add that one of our Health Instructors, during subject orientation, decided to insult us by saying, “How can you be a successful medical professional when you don’t want to be with other people and keep to yourself?”
Solitude and being an introvert is related to wanting peace, but it doesn’t mean that you don’t want to be with other people. You just aren’t wired to communicate the same way extroverts do. Don’t generalize people when you don’t know them.
There is no freedom in our schedules, and we have a lot of things to do. It’s not as if these things are what we want to join. Nope. It’s forced down our throats, and we cannot do anything about it, which makes it even worse.
Now, you might think that if you’re a Game of Thrones fan, you’d be thrilled to be in this.
Don’t be surprised to hear that none of the first years were thrilled.
We already have academics and clubs. Why push a nowhere agenda into our throats?
And dealing with classmates who are a bunch of scatterbrains is very much not my 2025 forte.
Oh well, God—what kind of message are You sending me? But if this is a place to improve, bring it on. Slowly.
I just don’t like how the community works there, and I’m not saying that I am an individualist. No, absolutely not—I’m more of an individualist with a collectivist conscience. I want my peace and independence, but I also think about how my actions affect my family, my friends, my future husband, my future children, and so on.
So, I currently don’t like the school system I am in because it forces collectivism down my throat. The reason why I don’t want to have a friend group is to let myself heal from being a bad friend, a bad leader, and a bad student.
I know it’s necessary to communicate with people, but if you force it down their throats, it causes more resentment than any good. I know I am resenting every decision that brought me to this uni, and it wasn’t even mine. The circumstances just didn’t align.
So, would getting what I truly wanted make me happy?
No.
No. It wouldn’t. But would it make the process more like a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down? Yes, yes it would.
And now, one way I’m handling it is by not being attached to anything that happens in my class—not that I wouldn’t care, but more like: I contribute, but I won’t go over the limit unless it’s for my own benefit. I know, it’s quite selfish, but giving myself to everything in my last days of high school left me feeling empty in the end, surviving such a hurricane.
What I have to do now is slowly let my classmates build my trust without giving them any expectations to do good in a personality sense, go beyond their limit, or respect and listen to other people—and find the missing gaps.
Although, in my case, I would not be willing to stay long in a classroom. These days, I can’t handle three classes in a day.
It’s funny because during high school and elementary days, we used to have classes until 5 in the afternoon, with nine classes a day.
Now, I have three classes a day, often dismissed around 2 or 3 in the afternoon, and I really can’t bear it. I really can’t. Some days we have classes in the evening, and my limit is absolutely pushed. Like, I can’t even stay awake during morning classes, and afternoon classes after lunch are worse because I’m so burdened with sleep—I can’t wake up.
And now, we’ll be at uni until 9 for the rest of the week because of some “community-building programs” that I don’t even want to be part of. It’s the fault of the fourth-year students for imposing this “tradition”—more like trauma to us.
I don’t know if this changes every year; I’m still a freshman. But this year, they went with Game of Thrones. Best believe next year it’s going to be Hunger Games: “I volunteer as tribute,” when very obviously no one volunteers as tribute.
Shall I make another blog on Substack for this, like “Postcard Rants in the Air” or “Rants Unfiltered”? Or shall I just have this for you, my dear Tumblr readers? Either way, I can’t wait to post my other blogs for you. And yes, I did study—but minimally, because my brain can’t focus. I need a break.
There’s something that starts to ache when I haven’t written in a while. Not pain—just pressure. A gentle but insistent reminder that I’ve left something unfinished. That somewhere in me, a sentence is trying to form, and it won’t leave me alone until I give it breath.
I used to think it was just a creative quirk. Now, I know—it’s a calling.
Writing is not always romantic. Sometimes it’s tea gone cold beside an open book, or an overworked brain staring at a blank screen at midnight. Sometimes it’s frustration at your own thoughts, how clumsy they feel when you try to shape them. But even then—especially then—I have to write.
These past few months, most of my words have gone into Footnotes for the Soul, my Substack. It’s become a quieter, steadier space where I can write at length about the things I hold closest: grief and wonder, literature, stories that leave you breathless. I’ve seen growth there—slow, genuine growth—and it’s been beautiful. The kind of growth that doesn’t go viral but lingers, like a candle flickering in a library window.
But I’ve missed Briechyne. This place. This strange, beloved corner of Tumblr. Where thoughts don’t have to be essays. Where I can speak without needing to conclude. Where a single photo, a passing line, or a quote from Tolkien can say everything that needs saying.
Tumblr isn’t the place for longform writing—at least not usually. But it is the place for resonance. For presence. For the kind of digital breath that reminds you you’re not thinking alone.
I started this blog as a place to breathe between chapters—between chapters of life, chapters of books, chapters of becoming. It’s the common room of my mind. The sketchbook. The corkboard. The place where thoughts gather before they turn into something more.
And now I’m here again, remembering that I don’t just want to write. I have to write.
To my fellow academists—the ones who think too deeply and love too much, the ones who annotate their books and underline with care, the ones who feel at home in dusty libraries and sunlit desks—I want to ask:
What would you like to read more of from me? What do you carry between the footnotes of your day?
Your voice matters to me. This blog is not just mine—it’s ours.
If you’ve found something here that makes you stay, or think, or feel seen… know that you’re invited to follow the longer journeys over on Substack. That’s where I write more fully. The long letters. The essays. The soulwork. And if you'd like to support what I do beyond the screen, there’s Patreon too—where I share the quiet pieces, the musings between drafts, and the unfiltered thoughts I rarely publish elsewhere.
But even if you’re just passing through, I hope you stay long enough to read a line or two. Because I have to write. And perhaps—you have to read.
Except for making me extremely annoyed to the core where I have to bring an umbrella—because I do bring an umbrella every day, it's a necessity—I’m a cat in a sense that I hate getting wet. But despite that, I love the rain.
I love the murky ambience it gives. I love how dark the sky looks and the comfort it brings me. I love the temperature of the rain—where it's not too hot that it burns my skin, nor too cold that it dries it up and leaves no moisture behind. I love the soft rhythm it sings while little drops fall from the sky, tapping against windows, slipping into the cracks of the world below.
And yet, I don’t love the destruction it brings—the way it floods streets, uproots trees, and strips away the beauty of the world it falls upon. Nature is absolutely beautiful, and I wish the rain would only nurture it, not take parts of it away.
It’s a pity that not everyone can enjoy the rain. Some without homes, some weighed down by bad days, some haunted by memories that the downpour drags back into the present.
So, what’s so special about these precipitated liquids?
Letting plants grow?
Comforting our souls?
Perhaps it’s the way the rain transforms everything, making the world feel alive again, even if just for a moment. As if it speaks in a language we all understand, even when we don't consciously hear it. The sound of it hitting rooftops, the gentle splash of puddles beneath our feet—it’s an invitation to pause, to slow down, to breathe.
The rain doesn’t care about our struggles, but in its quiet, unassuming way, it offers us a space to let go, to release our worries, to just be. And maybe that’s the real magic of it. It’s not in the storm or the chaos it can bring, but in those small, still moments where it reminds us that we’re part of something bigger, something more beautiful, even when it’s hidden beneath the clouds.
Everything under the rain makes it worthwhile seeing.
Hello, my friends!
I know that this monologue is free, but here’s the thing—I have so much more in store for you! If you’d like to support all of my works and get exclusive access to more monologues, behind-the-scenes thoughts, early blog drafts, and maybe even some personalized content, consider supporting me. Every bit of support helps me continue creating, and in return, I promise to bring you more words that inspire, comfort, and resonate.
Stay tuned for more, and thank you for being here! 💛
